David D. At The Movies: 14 Thoughts On Three Of The Summer’s Biggest Blockbuster Movies

So I found out on Friday that I strep throat, so in order to avoid infecting the rest of my family, I decided to spend all day Saturday at the movie theater where I could potentially infect total strangers.

What started as me finally getting to see Amazing Spider-Man 2 eventually led to me watching Godzilla and X-Men: Days Of Future Past all in one barely-interrupted marathon run. If you want detailed reviews of these movies, head on over to Vince’s domain because he’s actually competent at these things. Meanwhile, I’ll just share some random thoughts I had on each movie and go about my day.

Also: SPOILERS AHEAD.

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Amazing Spider-Man 2: Electric Boogaloo

1. I don’t give a sweet hot damn what you think, but this set of Spider-Man movies is way better than Sam Raimi’s originals. The original Spider-Man movies were pure cornball ass camp that treated everything with a wink and a nod to how silly it was. Go back and watch the movies again. They age horribly. Sure, Hipster Spider-Man has its own silliness inherent in the fact it takes itself a little too seriously, but it’s truer to the characters and the heart of Spider-Man than the originals.

2. The heart of the emotional conflict between Peter and Gwen Stacy is that they’re finishing high school and headed to college on separate paths and are contemplating breaking up. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t get emotionally invested in that story. I kept thinking that they’d forget about each other the minute the hunched another college freshman in the non-fiction section of the library. If Uncle Ben were around, he would have told Peter how much sweet, sweet butt he was missing out on by sticking with his high school chick. And you know Gwen would have racked up the moment she hopped on campus, too.

3. This bears mentioning: f*ck Mary Jane Watson and the horse she rode in on. Gwen Stacy was always a better match. She was smart, driven, fearless and caring. Mary Jane just said “Tiger” all seductively and sucked at everything else. I’m team Gwen all day, and I hope they don’t expect me to root for Mary Jane on the third movie…with her wack ass.

PS. Even if you didn’t read the comic, the ending was pretty clear roughly 45 seconds into the movie. Here’s the transcript of Gwen Stacy’s valedictorian speech (yes, she was valedictorian of her high school and Mary Jane probably barely graduated): “IN LIFE THINGS HAPPEN. LIKE DEATH. PEOPLE DIE. BEFORE YOU WANT THEM TO. I’M GOING TO DIE, EVERYONE!” Subtle foreshadowing, Hollywood.

4. #StayWokeDawg Alert: As I mentioned before on my social networks, I’m appalled that ASM is perpetuating the stereotype that Black men in hoodies electrocute people with their hands. Let’s get the NAACP in on this so Donald Sterling can get another Lifetime Achievement Award. Wait. By the way, Captain America featured a Black man getting pulled over and gunned down by 40 cops in broad daylight in D.C. and ASM featured a Black man in a hoodie getting shot at in Times Square. Who said comic book movies aren’t realistic? Too soon?

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Godzilla

5. Man, this movie really dragged. I kept wanting to see monster fights and they kept wanting to make me think and feel things. I did neither. I just waited for monster fights, which didn’t happen until the end of the movies.

6. I didn’t even know there was a regular-faced Olsen sister. *NBC “The More You Know” Rainbow*

7.Godzilla basically is a movie about a monster who was dormant for millennia but awakened to stop two other creatures totally unrelated to him from procreating. They really should have just called the movie Godzilla: The Hating Ass Hater Lizard. That’s c*ckblocking on steroids. He’s basically the embodiment of your girlfriend’s roommate who just gave her the “he needs to be paying rent if he’s gonna be here that damn much” speech.

8. The climatic scene is Godzilla fighting a giant wasp and the giant wasp’s baby momma in the street. Does WSHH get a writing credit?

X-Men: Days Of The Future Past

9. Yo. One day Bryan Singer walked into a writers’ room and said, “how can we make it like X-Men: The Last Stand never happened?” and this movie was born. God bless him for that. I don’t know where this movie stands as an X-Men movie quite yet, but it might be at the top right above or next to X-Men 2. This was just great.

10. However…there was one MAJOR plot hole (okay, there were a lot, but bear with me): if Trask and co. were looking for a big mutant transgression to rally humans behind the Sentinel program, why didn’t they just publicize the fact that Magneto KILLED JFK?! Trask spent the whole movie looking for backing and a galvanizing event but everyone thought that Magneto killed the President. Wouldn’t that be enough?

11. Either Halle Berry’s agent has been playing one elaborate prank on her or there’s an Oscar for best actress sitting at a pawn shop somewhere. In the last couple of years, Halle has been in Studio 43 aka The Movie That God Forgot, a freaking WWE Studios movie and a damn extra in the latest X-Men movie. She literally said two words then got thrown in the bushes. Angela Bassett shoulda been Storm anyway

12. So basically Fox threw Quicksilver in the movie just to make Marvel Studio’s life more difficult for trying to put their own version of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in the Avengers sequel, huh? He had some really dope scenes but he was pretty much a throw-in. Movie studios are so petty.

13. EN SABAH NUR. My body is ready for the next X-Men movie.

14. I’m still going with Captain America as the best comic movie of the year, but X-Men is damn close. Spider-Man felt too much like an extended trailer for the Sinister Six to be as great as it should have been.

Overall, though, I think we’re in a new era of comic book movies. A decade ago, the comic book aspects of the movies were afterthoughts or something the movies had to reconcile with. Think Batman or the first set of Spider-Man movies. They were good/great movies but they didn’t really satiate my desire to see full-on comic book stories on the big screen. Like, Dark Knight was a great movie, but was it a great Batman movie? I didn’t get nearly enough actual kick-ass fighting or detective work from him (the one bullet tracing scene aside).

Now with movies like Avengers and especially Days Of Future Past, comic book movies are a full-on marriage between the page and the big screen in a way that’s organic and not too inside baseball for the casual fan.

Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. Here’s hoping you enjoy these movies and that I didn’t give you strep.

BONUS

I want to take a minute and talk about the birth of the most annoying type of movie watcher: the Wannabe Comic Book Snob. This is the person who claps really loudly whenever Stan Lee does his cameo and urges the person next to him even though that person most certainly already knows Stan Lee is in the movie, too.

This is the person who read a comic or played the kickass X-Men arcade game or watched dunna dunna dunn dunn dunnn on Fox Kidz every Saturday, so when the movie does something different than that one detail he remembers, he harps on it to all his friends as the reason the movie sucked. For example, “Kitty Pride can’t make people go back in time, so this movie sucks.” Or maybe, hear me out. Maybe it’s a friggin’ movie and they changed some sh*t. Everything ever made ever based on a thing before it changes something.

So just deal with and shut your stupid bread hole while dealing with it.

I just love how DOFP was Fox saying “We really ruined this franchise and need to start this over” (First Class was great though!) and they got creative with the writing in order to recon all of the terrible errors they made instead of just hitting the reboot button like nothing happened.

To Halle Berry’s credit, she found out she was pregnant right before they started filming so they had to scale her back a little bit, but I doubt they would’ve did anything else with her since her character has been awful since the beginning. They need to fix her and Cyclops for the next go around movies because both of those characters suck.

And while I really enjoyed Godzilla, Pacific Rim was better. Pacific Rim knew what it was about and didn’t stray far from it, while Godzilla tried to get a little too in-depth and complex instead of embracing its “summer blockbuster” billing.

+1 million on the bonus paragraph. These Comic Book Snobs enter a movie like it’s the Playa Haters Ball (Shout Out Silky Johnson). I mean damn, you get to see a live version of Iceman slide down ice and blast fools, enjoy the shit and shut up…

For the most part I let shit go when I watch films. I hadn’t even read DOFP so I couldn’t say whether it was accurate or not that night (close enough, when I read it yesterday). But all my friends know I read comics so all of them looked at me like, “….Can Kitty Pryde time travel?”

The movie was decent but I still took a small amount of pride in saying, “Man, hell naw.” I do wanna know why Singer got a habit of killing X-Men tho. Like, in a “blink and you miss it” sort of way, they flat out tell you everybody from First Class that you don’t see in this movie is dead. Havok, Magneto, Prof. X, Beast, and Mystique lived. Everybody else got murked.

And yeah, I might not agree with you on a lot but DAMN these new Spider-Man films way better than the originals. The only people who think they aren’t: A.) Haven’t seen the originals in a while, or B.) Are just salty about a remake coming so soon. The fact that Spider-Man tells jokes is enough to push this way over.

Personally, I kinda hate all the Spider-Man flicks and I’m just waiting,praying,hoping for the day Obama finally makes Sony and Fox give Marvel their stuff back so these great stories can get their just due.

Ummm….. Well, see the new Xmen of course but, I haven’t seen Godzilla only because it seems everybody is saying “Wait for it to hit the net or DVD”.

As far as if you should see the other movies…………… I’ll say yes. Just so you can see the good run of X1 and X2. X3 is not needed unless you want to see the Spiderman 3 version of X-men. Tho, Jean Grey was tearing some shit up in the last installment of that triology.

But yeah just check out X1, X2, and obviously “X-men First Class”. X3 only if you feel like it

Yo. One day Bryan Singer walked into a writers’ room and said, “how can we make it like X-Men: The Last Stand never happened?” and this movie was born. God bless him for that. I don’t know where this movie stands as an X-Men movie quite yet, but it might be at the top right above or next to X-Men 2. This was just great.
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Had no idea who EN SABAH NUR was (Batman stan) but, when I did my research on the net i cant’t lie, I got hyped. I know nothing about the original source material but, digging deep and seeing what his powers were I can’t wait to see how this plays out. Magneto and Logan are no longer the big Alpha dogs in the X-men world.

As far as teh rest of the movies well, I can’t lie. ASM2 was cool. I was going in the movie still VERY upset at the last one and, still bitter about them restarting the Franchise but, I am starting to accept this new direction. And, your right this Spiderman was more closer to the Comics. I can’t even deny that. I was so used to Toby as Spiderman that I forgot how much of a smartass this dude was.

I was going to see “Godzilla” but, it seems that the overall agreement is “Eh”. Which sucks but lets be real: Heisenberg hyped this movie up more than the actual monster. I think “Breaking Bad” success helped this movie make some money because, who was really looking for a Godzilla remake?

Its been a good Summer run tho. Right now I have to rank it as this

1)DOFP
2)ASM2
3)Captain America

“Guardians of the Galaxy” seems it might surprise me tho so, those rankings may change.

Also, the way Magneto got Logan. DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!! They made it look just like the comic when Wolverine had his Adamantium removed by Magneto too, but he didn’t even have any! Man that scene was dope.

Man, Godzilla was epic. Although it dragged a bit and the actor from Kickass was kinda bland, I throughly enjoyed it. Im just not into Spiderman and X-Men movies even tho I loved the cartoons growing up. I just find them so corny.

Honestly, this reference alone is why David D. is one of my favorite writers of all time.
If you don’t know what this refers to… GET OUT, and never come back…. At least until you’ve seen the WHOLE THING on Netflix.